Privacy

What is kept

Four things, and nothing else:

• Your email address and your display name. The address is how you sign in and how an account is recovered. The name is what other people in your halaqah see, and you choose it.
• Whatever you upload. Documents, photographs of pages, audio and video, and links you paste. The text pulled out of them is kept too, because that is what the daily portions are built from.
• Your study record. Which plans you have, what you have finished, which questions you have been asked and how you answered.
• Which halaqat you belong to, and when you joined.

There is no analytics package in the app. Nothing records which screens you open, how long you look at them, or where you are. There is no advertising identifier because there is no advertising.

Who else sees it

Running the app means handing parts of this to other companies. Here is all of them and exactly what each one gets.

Clerk

Handles sign-in. Holds your email address and, if you sign in with Google, whatever Google passes on. Halaqat never sees or stores your password.

DigitalOcean

Runs the servers, the database and the file storage. Everything in the section above physically lives here.

Google (Gemini)

Splits your material into daily portions, writes the questions, and marks written answers. It receives the text of what you uploaded and the answers you type. It does not receive your email address or your name.

Groq

Transcribes audio and video. It receives the recording. Nothing else.

RapidAPI

Used only when you paste a link to a video, to get the audio so it can be transcribed. It receives the link.

YouTube

When a lesson is a YouTube video it plays inside the app through YouTube's own official player, so YouTube sees the view in the ordinary way it would if you watched it on their site. Their terms and privacy policy apply to that part.

Nobody on that list is paid for your data and nobody is given it for their own purposes. Your information is not sold, rented, or handed to advertisers, and there is no arrangement under which that could change quietly.

One thing worth understanding about uploads

Uploaded material is stored once and shared. If you and somebody else upload the same book, it is kept as a single copy that both of you can reach, rather than two.

This matters for two reasons. It keeps the app affordable, which is why it is done. And it means that when you delete your account, that copy stays, because deleting it would take the book out from under whoever else is studying it. What is removed is your link to it, your plans over it, and everything you did with it.

Content you add to a halaqah is visible to the other members of that halaqah. That is the point of a halaqah, and it is worth saying plainly anyway.

Getting rid of it

Open the app, go to You, and choose Delete my account. It happens immediately and it cannot be undone.

That removes your account, your plans, your progress, your answers, your revision history and your memberships. If you own a halaqah that other people are in, it passes to whoever has been in it longest, so their study does not stop because you left.

Backups are taken nightly and kept for about a month, so a deleted account survives in those until they age out. They are only ever restored to recover from a failure, never to bring back a single person's data.

If you would rather ask than tap, write to faresgheyath@gmail.com and it will be done for you.

Children

Halaqat is not aimed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has an account here, write to the address above and it will be removed.

Changes

If this changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, the date at the top changes and the app will say so before the change takes effect. Corrections to wording will not.

Asking

faresgheyath@gmail.com. A question about your own data will be answered by a person.